China on Schwarzenegger and D.S.K.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn are not easy names to translate into Chinese. (In case someone stops you on the street and asks, here you go: A’nuo Shiwaxinge and Duominike Sitelaosi-Ka’en.) But that hardly seemed like enough of a reason to explain why this month’s most extravagant scandals are receiving little more than perfunctory attention in China, compared to the reaction among the other four-fifths of humanity. Is the Chinese public less interested in the prurient details of public figures? Are they not interested in the I.M.F.? Did the Terminator never sear his dreary one-liners into the minds of headline-writers of the Middle Kingdom?

Absolutely not. The explanation might be one of context: “In the annals of absurd debauchery, this can hardly compete with Chinese officials,” the commentator LLee put it this week, on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Or, as someone else asked, “What’s wrong with the mighty head of a state having an extra child? If the head of a Chinese village didn’t have a few wives and mistresses, he would be so embarrassed.” If D.S.K. were in China, someone snickered, this would be “called ‘a leader having a heart-to-heart talk with a female comrade’; in America, it’s called rape.” (Strauss-Kahn was indicted on Thursday on seven counts of sexual assault; he has denied the charges.)

Have things really gone that far? Well, even if you correct for the jeering culture of the Web, the Chinese public has been barraged with official sex scandals of late. Chinese newspapers, after all, excerpted the diary of a local cadre named Han Feng, who kept detailed accounts of his accomplishments and aspirations. “Womanizing is on the right track,” he wrote in December 2007. “It’s been a lucky year with women. I need to pay attention to my health with so many sex partners.” The diary recorded affairs with five colleagues as well as constant carousing with local officials, police, and directors of tobacco companies. Then there was the case of Deng Yujiao, a twenty-one-year-old pedicure worker who stabbed and killed the director of the local township business-promotion office when he tried to force her to have sex with him. Initially, Deng was arrested, and charged with homicide, but her case captured national attention, and after several online petitions and protests, her murder charges were dropped in favor of a minor charge with no sentence.

There is so much money and power sloshing around in China, and so few people ready to look over shoulders to see how it is apportioned, that the intersection of sex and politics has begun to look very American. But, at times, some of these scandals seem to be driven by the ambition for superlatives that has given China the world’s largest shopping malls and bridges and the like. It will be a while before a California politician can match the allegations against Liu Zhijun, the minister responsible for building China’s high-speed rail network. When he was sacked in February, he was accused of skimming more than a hundred-and-fifty million U.S. dollars in bribes and of keeping as many as eighteen mistresses.

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